a community gallery of new writing, art and commentary hosted by Ron Slate
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Introduction The nonlinear structure of “The Whisper of the Wind” weaves together three seemingly disparate tales that converge in surprising ways. In one, a Mexican teenage girl and her family flee their hometown, displaced by the violence of the drug cartels that dominate their region. They settle in Guadalajara, where the girl finds work as […]
Mother’s Day Still I struggle to rise, breathing in the quiet, trying to believe in patience as I teach the child to make the bread, to mix the flour and water, feed the starter so the yeast can grow, keep going even days after it’s been fed. As something fed me all […]
Few documents have been scrutinized more than our Declaration of Independence, with particular attention lavished on the truth that all men are created equal. The Declaration’s signers, a small cadre of white male property owners, were referring to themselves, but once the democracy genie had escaped the bottle, equality morphed into guises the Founders couldn’t […]
Criminal Behavior 1 In the beginning, the fatal beating is just a local news story. A curiosity to follow. Terrible behavior reported in a newspaper circulated through small towns and rural communities within an hour’s drive. Alleged, the articles always acknowledge, when the names and actions of the two men who are about to […]
Scaffolding a World of Refuge In Even Time Bleeds, the poet and translator Forrest Gander selects and translates poetry from nine books of poetry by the Mexican poet, translator, and publisher Jeannette Clariond. Clariond’s poetry crystallizes an imaginary world built of the elements, where words inhere in things but don’t structure reality. Of the […]
Translator’s Introduction Colette was partial to The Pure and the Impure. When the American writer Glenway Wescott visited her Palais-Royal apartment in 1952, more than a decade after its publication and two years before her death, she had just reread it, and told him she believed it to be her best book. She also considered […]
“Call Every Resource”: Muriel Rukeyser in the Twenty-First Century with Catherine Gander and Stefania Heim In a series of lectures delivered at American colleges in the 1940s, later adapted and published as The Life of Poetry, Muriel Rukeyser developed a defense of poetry as the cultural form best suited to respond to conditions of […]
Gold Watch The brutality of fact — Francis Bacon I can see it, a lover’s theft and gift. Death, still seated on the toilet in our suite at the Hôtel des Saint-Pères. Painted this way, on a chair, drunk, […]
When the people are ready a book arrives. Or when a poet is ready, has been ready, ready and steady, writing the book of a moment all his or her life, the book arrives. Rather chillingly –– and yet hopefully, if such a thing could be true –– Peter Balakian’s New York Trilogy appears this season […]
After a Language Is Lost My tongue, as if sitting on it / Two minutes of a day / heavy enough / to crush words / coming out my mouth. / I remember: / my father, / the car. / Everything overturned, / even time. / They ask my name. / Messy letters in […]